2 Simple Steps to Enable Grayscale Mode on Pixel or Nexus (No Root)

You might not know this but your Google Pixel (or your Nexus) both have AMOLED screens.

“Okay. I get you man, but besides us having much better screens than our LCD counterparts :cough: apple users :cough: what else does having an AMOLED screen bring to the table?”

Ahh now here’s where it gets interesting:

If you have a phone with an AMOLED screen then you can save your battery life without sacrificing much of the visibility of your phone all by just doing one simple thing.

How?

By going Grayscale.

To understand how going Grayscale works to save your battery life, you’ve first got to understand how both AMOLED screens and LED screens work.

Oh btw If you’re as impatient as me then you can skip straight to the steps on how to enable Grayscale mode on Pixel (or your Nexus) from here haha. 🙂

The Reason Behind It

In OLED based screens (that includes AMOLED), each of the pixel provides its own lighting.

Whilst in LED/LCD based screens, there is a screen wide backlight that illuminates or shines light through all of the pixels at once.

Let me draw it for you with this great two minute video by CNET on this:

Put it this way,

OLED (and AMOLED) screens are like having light switches in each room of your house whereas LED/LCD screens are like having one central master switch for all of the lights in your house regardless of whether the room is being used or not.

Thus, OLED (and AMOLED) based screens where the blacks means that the pixels are turned off. Meaning, no power is being consumed by that pixel.

On the other hand, LED/LCD based screens which have black pixels means that the backlight is still turned on to illuminate all other pixels on the screen which doesn’t really save any power.

In this case if you ever enable Grayscale mode on Pixel or your Nexus (both of which are OLED/AMOLED based screen phones) then you can save your phone’s battery life as less power will be used to power up the screen without the need to ever decrease the brightness of your screen.

I’ll show you how how you can get started by . 🙂

How to Enable Grayscale Mode on Pixel (No Root Needed): 2 Steps

1. Enable Developer Options

Step 1: Head over to your About phone in your Settings.

Step 2: Done? Sweet! Now things are about to get fun. Scroll down on that same page until you see Build Number. Tap on that seven times in rapid succession. If you do it right, you’ll see a message congratulating you that “You are now a Developer!”.

2. Enable the Monochromacy Color Space (Grayscale)

Step 1: Now head back to your main Settings menu, and then scroll down until you see Developer Options somewhere around the bottom.

Step 2: From there scroll down until you see Hardware accelerated rendering near the bottom of the menu.

Step 3: You’re almost done! Now just below the Hardware accelerated rendering (and just above Media) you’ll see a Simulate color space option. Select that and from there choose Monochromacy.

Voila!

If you ever need to turn Grayscale Mode off, then all you have to is just repeat Step (2) but this time just select Disable.